Friday, January 4, 2019

Xi Jinping Thinks China Is World's Only Sovereign State

by Gordon G. Chang • January 4, 2019 at 5:00 am

The trend of Chinese ruler Xi Jinping's recent comments warns us that his China does not want to live within the current Westphalian system of nation states or even to adjust it. From every indication, Xi is thinking of overthrowing it altogether.
Beijing now thinks it can, with impunity, injure Americans. In the first week of May, the Pentagon said that China, from its base in Djibouti, lasered a C-130 military cargo plane, causing eye injuries to two American pilots.
The laser attack in the Horn of Africa, far from any Chinese boundaries, highlights Beijing's unstated position that the U.S. military has no right to operate anywhere and that China is free to do whatever it wants anyplace it chooses. And let us understand the severity of the Chinese act: an attempt to blind pilots is akin to an attempt to bring down their planes, and an attempt to bring down planes is an assertion China has the right to kill.

The trend of Chinese ruler Xi Jinping's recent comments warns us that his China does not want to live within the current Westphalian system or even to adjust it. From every indication, Xi is thinking of overthrowing it altogether. Pictured: Xi Jinping (center) at a Chinese Communist Party event on January 2, 2019 in Beijing. (Photo by Mark Schiefelbein-Pool/Getty Images)

"I hear prominent Americans, disappointed that China has not become a democracy, claiming that China poses a threat to the American way of life," Jimmy Carter wrote on the last day of 2018 in a Washington Post op-ed. That claim, Carter tells us, is a "dangerous notion."

There is nothing more dangerous than a notion from the 39th president, even on China. China, despite what he said, threatens not only America's way of life but also the existence of the American republic. Chinese ruler Xi Jinping has, in recent years, been making the extraordinary case that the U.S. is not a sovereign state.

The breathtaking position puts China's aggressive actions into a far more ominous context.